« Assimilation does not necessarily make settlers: Lilly Havstad, ‘Indígena or Não-Indígena? The Gendered Politics of Assimilation in Colonial Mozambique, 1917–61’, Gender & History, 2021
Settlers in Indigenous-led movements: J. M. Bacon, ‘”Who Had to Die So I Could Go Camping?”: Shifting non-Native conceptions of land and environment through engagement with Indigenous thought and action’, Ethics, Policy & Environment, 2021 »

The making of settler ecologies: Lindsey Dillon, ‘Civilizing swamps in California: Formations of race, nature, and property in the nineteenth century U.S. West’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2021

27Jul21

Abstract: This paper examines the production of settler ecologies through nineteenth century swamp reclamation projects in California. It focuses on the transformation of inland swamps into agricultural land and San Francisco salt marshes and tidelands into urban real estate. I argue that swamp reclamation was both an economic and a racial project. Swamp reclamation sought to transform perceived wastelands into productive property. Swamp reclamation was also a racial project, in at least three ways. First, it aimed to transform colonial environments for the health of the white settler body. Second, draining swamps and making solid land depended on a racialized labor force. Third, swamp reclamation was accelerated through government subsidies that largely benefitted white settlers at the same time the state of California disenfranchised Black, Chinese, and Indigenous residents and supported racial immigration policies. These formations of race, nature, and property were established by law and political economy, and undergirded by settler epistemologies of space and nature. By studying the discourses and practices of swamp reclamation in nineteenth century California, this paper contributes to scholarship on the production of settler ecologies under conditions of racial capitalism.


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